The present invention relates to an ultrasonic imaging system. The invention is particularly suitable for dental diagnostic applications, particularly for analyzing the surrounding structures of teeth for diagnosing periodontitis.
For dental diagnostic application, a toothbrush-like ultrasound probe is used. A piezoelectric transducer is swung in a pendulum motion to emit an acoustic beam in a sector field. The acoustic beam is transmitted in the form of a burst pulse to a tooth to be examined. The probe is connected to an ultrasonic imaging system for converting echoes returning along a plurality of angularly spaced paths into electrical echo signals. For providing the echo signals on display, the sector scan format is converted to a conventional raster scan format. It is convenient for dentists to be able to display a number of dental tomographic images on separate areas of a monitor screen. However, the need to employ typical prior art scan conversion techniques would result in an ultrasonic multiple imaging system which is complex and costly.